take away my pig by merely proving that everybody said it was
stolen; but they could brand me as a liar by merely proving what the
villagers said! It seems incredible that men should put such value on a
pig."

Sir Henry Marquis laughed.

"It is not entirely a question of values, Count."

"I beg you to pardon me, monsieur," the Italian went on. "Doubtless, on
this subject I do nothing more than reveal an intelligence lamentably
inefficient; but I had the idea that English people were accustomed to
regard property of greater importance than life."

"I have never heard," replied the Englishman, smiling, "that our courts
gave more attention to pigs than to murder."

"Why, yes, monsieur," said the Count--"that is precisely what they have
been accustomed to do. It is only, I believe, within recent years that
one convicted of murder in England could take an appeal to a higher
court; though a controversy over pigs--or, at any rate, the pasture on
which they gathered acorns--could always be carried up."

The great age of the Count--he seemed to be the representative in the
world of some vanished empire--gave his irony a certain indirection.
Everybody laughed. And he added: "Even your word 'murder,' I believe,
was originally the name of a fine imposed by the Danes on a village
unless it could be proved that the person found dead was an Englishman!

"I wonder when, precisely, the world began to regard it as a crime to
kill an Englishman?"

The parchment on the bones of his face wrinkled into a sort of smile.
His greatest friend on the Riviera was this pipe-smoking Briton.

Then suddenly, with a nimble gesture that one would not believe possible
in the aged, he stripped back his sleeve and exhibited a long, curiously
twisted scar, as though a bullet had plowed along the arm.

"Alas, monsieur," he said, "I myself live in the most primitive
condition of society! I pay a tribute for life.... Ah! no, monsieur;
it is not to the Camorra that I pay. It is quite unromantic. I think my
secretary carries it in his books as a pension to an indigent relative."

He turned to the American

"Believe me, monsieur, my estates in Salerno are not what they were; the
olive trees are old and all drains on my income are a burden--even this
gratuity. I thought I should be rid of it; but, alas, the extraordinary
conception of justice in your country!"

He broke the cigarette in his fingers, and flung the pieces over the
terrace.

"In the